Is my CD-era over?

[lasse]

Today, I downloaded the WImP-app to my Ipad.

Lossless access to over 20 miljons albums.

Will I ever buy Another CD-album?

Regards//lasse

[maynardg]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

What format? What cost?

[turn2]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

What format? What cost?

Looks like 320AAC or ALAC lossless. It appears to be a Euro-based service. I wasn't interested enough to try a translation.

[jonasz]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

It's FLAC. Lossless, sounds very nice.

[lasse]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

It's FLAC. Lossless, sounds very nice.

Hi all,

yes, it sounds very nice indeed.

I made a "Quick and Dirty" A/B-test with the same CD on the drive as via WiMP and in spite of the fact that the "WiMP-signal" is fed through the headphone-outlet of the pad and A/D-converted two times it is hard to distinguish from the CD.

The CD-signal is in digital domain all the way to the poweramps (CDdrive-Behringer SRC2496-DCX2496-6gang pot-NAD916 poweramps)


By the way, is this calculation correct on what bandwith is required to transfer lossless CD-quality?

44100 samples/s * 16 bits/sample * 2 channels = 1.4Mbit/s?


Best regards//lasse

[fprawn]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

By the way, is this calculation correct on what bandwith is required to transfer lossless CD-quality?

44100 samples/s * 16 bits/sample * 2 channels = 1.4Mbit/s?


Best regards//lasse

That's correct for the uncompressed amount of data, but there are many lossless compression algorithms to choose from which will reduce that number while retaining all of the information. I think whatever FLAC is using typically halves the size.

[ameuba10]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

What app is it?

[lasse]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

That's correct for the uncompressed amount of data, but there are many lossless compression algorithms to choose from which will reduce that number while retaining all of the information. I think whatever FLAC is using typically halves the size.

Hi,

just wondering: I thought that "lossless" was all about leaving every original "0" and every "1" in its original order and to transfer them all without exceptions to the last D/A-conversion. Like in the CD-drive? No "compression" at all.....

or am I wrong?

regards//lasse

[JasonP]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

Lasse, don't confuse "compression" with "loss of fidelity" there are many algorithms to compress digital data with no loss of fidelity. You may have heard of .zip or .7z or even .gz or .bz2? All of these formats allow compression of digital data without loss of fidelity. FLAC or apple lossless do the same for audio. Rest assured, all your zeroes and ones are there for you in order once restored.

[rhubarb9999]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

I converted my CD collection 10 years ago and have not touched a disc since. Anything new has been downloaded.

Just make sure you always have a backup.

[fprawn]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

Lasse, don't confuse "compression" with "loss of fidelity" there are many algorithms to compress digital data with no loss of fidelity. You may have heard of .zip or .7z or even .gz or .bz2? All of these formats allow compression of digital data without loss of fidelity. FLAC or apple lossless do the same for audio. Rest assured, all your zeroes and ones are there for you in order once restored.

Yep, quite right. Choosing when to use compression or not is all about tradeoffs. Compressing and decompressing data takes processing time, but reduces space and/or bandwidth requirements. The CD format is uncompressed, allowing for CD players to be simple devices that don't need to do a lot of heavy lifting to turn that disc into sound. But if the CD were made today, it would almost certainly be compressed because of advances in computing. If they used FLAC, the result would be a CD of exactly the same fidelity, but capable of storing nearly twice as much music, or it could be a physically smaller disc and store the same amount. A true win-win situation.

Lossy compression adds an additional tradeoff where you can trade fidelity for even more space, but this gets a lot hairier. The first MP3s sounded quite bad by modern comparison, but made transferring music possible in a reasonable amount of time over a dial up connection. As technology advances, that tradeoff keeps getting pushed closer to lossless. With modern broadband connections, even completely uncompressed music would transfer in reasonable amounts of time, but it makes no sense to not use some kind lossless compression because we have so much spare computing power to take advantage of. For a business with large bandwidth costs, using lossy compression makes sense because most people can't tell the difference and it can save a lot of money as well as make for a better user experience as they don't have to wait as long for a song to download.

Additionally, there are actually many situations where compressing is not a tradeoff, but an optimization. When the bottleneck is not processor power but transfer speeds (and this is very often the case with modern computers), compressing the data for transfer ends up being faster overall than not compressing and having to transfer a larger amount of data over a slow connection. That connection can be an Internet connection, or even something local like a hard drive which tend to be much slower than the rest of the computer.

Apologies for the tangent, I find this kind of thing fascinating. If anyone is interested in learning how exactly FLAC manages to not lose any data, wikipedia has all the answers: Golomb-Rice code. That one is a bit complex, but if you would just like to see how simple lossless compression can work, check out RLE. As simple as RLE is, it actually still has modern uses within other algorithms (including Golomb-Rice) and because it's so fast to decompress on the fly.

[lasse]

Re: Is my CD-era over?

I converted my CD collection 10 years ago and have not touched a disc since. Anything new has been downloaded.

Just make sure you always have a backup.

Hi,

my plan is to rely on Internet-access and if, God forbid, this access is broken, well I have hundreds of CD´s to play. (and I will keep the CD-players)

To convert all of my CD´s to some format on a hard-drive when most of the material is available via the Net, seems like "crossing the river to get some water", don´t you think?:rolleyes:

Best regards//lasse